Laptop Upgrade Notes

My new laptop is an HP EliteBook 8540w, running 64-bit Windows 7 Enterprise. What follows are various issues and their resolutions which I've run into while setting it up. I'm just putting it here in case anyone goes Googling for similar issues.

When I look at this list, I wonder why so many people seem to think that Windows is easy to use...

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Problem: When the laptop comes out of hibernation mode the screen is corrupted and the system eventually hangs.

Cause: Turns out that the nvidia driver that HP shipped with the notebook isn't actually supported on Windows 7. (Just how the heck did that happen?)

Solution: Download and install an updated driver.

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Problem: When I run a 64-bit executable built with Windows Visual C++ 2008, in debug mode, it fails with an error saying that its "side-by-side configuration is incorrect".

Cause: Looking in the event log shows that the debug version of the Microsoft Visual C++ runtime library cannot be found. This is apparently due to a bug in the Visual Studio 2008 (VS2008) installer. When I installed VS2008 I neglected to tell it to install the 64-bit compiler (which, bizarrely, is disabled by default, even on 64-bit systems). So I re-ran the setup and told it to add the 64-bit compiler. It did so but failed to also install the 64-bit debug runtime libraries.

Solution: Completely uninstall Visual Studio 2008, then reinstall it, this time enabling 64-bit compiler installation from the very start.

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Problem: When I re-run the Visual Studio 2008 setup program, either to change the installed packages or to uninstall it, it dies during initialization with the message "A problem has been encountered while loading the setup components."

Cause: A Microsoft hotfix for VS2008 breaks their own installer.

Solution: Uninstall all of the Visual Studio 2008 hotfixes and service packs. After that the installer should work fine again.

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Problem: When I drag a window around the screen, if I let go of it too close to the edge of the screen it automatically maximizes, taking over my entire desktop.

Cause: This is a new feature of Windows 7. I find it incredibly annoying. If I'd wanted the window to maximize I'd have clicked on the maximize button, I wouldn't be dragging it around. Does anyone actually like this feature?

Solution: From the Start Menu go to [Control Panel -> Ease of Access Center -> Make the mouse easier to use] Turn on the 'Prevent windows from being automatically arranged when moved to the edge of the screen' checkbox.

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Problem: When I try to run sxstrace to get more info on missing DLLs, I get an 'Access denied' error.

Cause: You need admin privs to run sxstrace.

Solution: From the Start Menu go to [All Programs -> Accessories -> Command Prompt] and right-click on it. Select 'Run as administrator' from the popup menu. Run sxstrace from the command prompt.

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Problem: Windows Explorer suddenly gets really slow, taking several seconds to expand a directory which only contains a handful of files.

Cause: No idea.

Solution: Close the Windows Explorer window and reopen it.

Fast File Deletion On Windows

I frequently need to delete large numbers of files. For example, when I want to do a clean build of our product I have to delete the old build, which is a directory tree containing upwards of 90,000 files totalling several gigabytes of disk space. On Linux and OS X this is a snap: the 'rm -rf' command takes a little under a minute to delete the whole shebang.

On Windows it's a much slower process. First, I "delete" the directory by selecting it and hitting the delete key. That doesn't really delete the files, though, it just copies them to the Recycle Bin, which can take a couple of minutes. The directory tree is still present on the disk, consuming all those gigabytes of space. So now I have to empty the Recycle Bin, which takes another couple of minutes.

Today I found out about the neat trick of holding down the left Shift key when pressing the delete key. That causes the files to really be deleted, not moved to the Recycle Bin. That gets rid of one step and cuts the time to delete files roughly in half. That's still about five times as long as it takes on Linux or OS X, thanks to Windows' hideously inefficient file system, but that's still better than the ten times as long that I've had to put up with until now.

New Laptop Performance

I've finally managed to get our product building on my new laptop. Several of the problems that I ran into were of my own making. It's been that kind of week.

It takes two hours to build our product from scratch on the new system, which is a significant improvement over four hours on the old system.

That compares to one hour on my OS X system and a mere 17 minutes on my Linux system. It's not a fair comparison, though, because the laptop only has a 1.73GHz Core i7-820QM (4 physical cores, 8 hyperthreaded) while my OS X system has dual 2.4GHz Xeon E5620 (8 physical cores, 16 hyperthreaded) and my Linux system has dual 2.66GHz Xeon X5650 (12 physical cores, 24 hyperthreaded).

Spring Is Here!

Okay, maybe not by the official definition of spring, but my personal definition is when sunset doesn't arrive until 18:00, which happened on Wednesday. That leaves a sufficiently large window of daylight after the folks in Toronto go home (roughly 15:00 my time) that I can actually get some geocaching done after work.

Assuming, that is, that the overcast ever breaks.

Summary Of PC Blue Menu Nutritional Stats

And here's the part that I've been waiting for, even if you haven't: a chart comparing the nutritional stats of all the President's Choice Blue Menu frozen meals that I've reviewed.

Calories are per gram of food. Fat, sodium (Na) and fibre are milligrams per gram of food. Vitamins and minerals are percent of daily requirement per 100 grams of food (just to avoid lots of leading zeroes).

Red means a particularly bad stat, green a particularly good one.

Dish	Wt	Cal /g	Fat mg/g					Na mg/g	Fibre mg/g	Vitamins %/100g		Minerals %/100g		Taste
			Tot	Sat	Ω-3	Ω-6	6/3			Vit A	Vit C	Ca	Fe
Barley Risotto With Herbed Chicken	290	1.0	20.7	5.17	0.34	3.45	10.0	2.0	17.0	2.76	2.07	2.07	5.17	Bland
Chipotle Chicken Quesadilla	125	1.6	36.0	8.0	0.0	0.0	n/a	2.48	40.0	0.0	0.0	8.0	8.0	Tasty
General Tao Chicken	365	1.29	10.9	2.74	0.27	2.74	10.0	1.89	8.22	1.1	1.1	0.55	2.2	Tasty-
Chicken Bangkok	280	0.89	8.93	3.57	0.0	0.0	n/a	1.79	10.7	5.36	2.14	2.14	5.36	Tasty-
Sweet Chili Lemon Grass Chicken	350	1.0	12.9	1.43	0.86	2.86	3.33	1.91	2.86	1.14	10.0	0.57	0.0	Tasty
Chicken & Ricotta Cheese Calzones	246	1.95	36.6	12.2	1.63	6.50	4.0	4.47	16.3	1.63	1.63	6.5	16.3	Tasty
Whole Wheat Rotini With Chicken Pesto	280	1.32	28.6	7.14	1.43	5.36	3.75	2.39	21.4	5.36	1.43	5.36	7.14	Tasty
Roasted Vegetable Lasgna	283	1.02	31.0	15.9	0.0	0.0	n/a	1.91	17.7	7.07	5.30	8.83	8.83	Delicious
Chicken Szechwan	225	0.89	17.8	4.44	0.0	0.0	n/a	1.96	8.89	6.67	8.89	1.78	6.67	Tasty-
Sweet And Sour Chicken	350	1.0	5.71	1.43	0.29	1.43	5.0	1.11	5.71	0.57	8.57	0.57	0.0	Tasty+

As you can see, it's a pretty mixed bag. The rotini seems the clear winner, but only because several of its numbers just barely escaped being flagged in red.

Hmm. Not really sure what that tells me, except to stay away from the risotto, and I knew that after the first few bites.

General Tao's Spicy Chicken (Healthy Choice Steamer)

And now on to the Healthy Choice Gourmet Steamers frozen meals that I picked up a few days ago. The first one is General Tao's Spicy Chicken. It consists of chunks of chicken breast on a bed of white rice with peas and bits of carrots, red bell peppers and green onions mixed in, with a sweet and spicy sauce. Unlike the standard restaurant version of General Tao's chicken, the chicken in this dish is neither breaded nor battered, but is seasoned.

I didn't realize until I took this one out of the freezer exactly what these "Gourmet Steamers" are. There are two plastic trays, one nested inside the other. The lower tray contains the sauce. The upper tray is peppered with holes and contains the rest of the food. The idea is that steam from the sauce helps to cook the food above and keep it moist, without boiling all the flavour and nutrients out of it.

It all sounds rather gimmicky to me. While I prefer steamed vegetables over boiled, I find it unlikely that five minutes in a microwave is sufficient to steam chicken and veggies embedded in a frozen mass of rice. So everything must already be pre-cooked and the steam is just helping to thaw the food. I'm don't really see too much benefit in that over the standard microwaved frozen meal.

My scepticism not withstanding, I have to say that the results were excellent. The chicken, rice and veggies were all cooked to perfection. Nothing came out too hard, nothing came out mushy. The taste was very good as well, earning it my second Delicious rating so far: sweet and sufficiently spicy to leave a gentle warmth in my mouth after the meal was finished.

Stats:

Weight: 306g
Calories: 300 [0.98cal/g]
Fat: 3g [9.80mg/g]
Saturated Fat: 0.5 [1.63mg/g]
Trans Fat: 0.0g
Omega-3: 0.0g
Omega-6: 0.0g
Omega 6/3 Ratio: n/a
Sodium: 450mg [1.47mg/g]
Fibre: 4g [13.1mg/g]
Vitamin A: 25% [8.17%/100g]
Vitamin C: 10% [3.27%/100g]
Calcium: 4% [1.31%/100g]
Iron: 6% [1.96%/100g]
Taste: Delicious

Pros: low in fat; low in saturated fat; good source of vitamin A; low calorie density

Cons: no omegas.